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Dame Cecily Isabel Fairfield, known as Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, was a British author, journalist, literary critic and travel writer. An author who wrote in many genres, West reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, The Sunday Telegraph and The New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman.
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culture · British author and journalist (1892–1983) · journalist · writer · literary critic · essayist · suffragette · prose writer · opinion journalist · novelist · travel writer · also Rebecca West, West, Dame Rebecca, Dame Rebecca West, Cicely Fairchild, Cicily Isabel Andrews, Cicily Andrews
Born 21 December 1892 · Died 15 March 1983 · Q236669
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“it is our tendency to sympathise with the hunted hare... much that we read of Western European heretics makes us suspect that here the quarry was less of a hare than a priggish skunk.”
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“My problem is complicated by the fact that the defence, the people who would naturally be against the Judge and for me, are mostly Communist and won”
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Died 1983-03-15.
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“Everyone realizes that one can believe little of what people say about each other. But it is not so widely realized that even less can one trust what people say about themselves.”
“Present-day women's lib … is repudiation of the obligation to follow a certain pattern if you are a woman. It is much more fundamental than suffragism. And, on the whole, I am with it.”
“There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.”
“Motherhood is the strangest thing, it can be like being one’s own Trojan horse.”
“I do not myself find it agreeable to be 90, and I cannot imagine why it should seem so to other people. It is not that you have any fears about your own death, it is that your upholstery is already dead around you.”
“After any disturbance (such as two world wars coinciding with a period of growing economic and monetary incomprehensibility) we find our old concepts inadequate and look for new ones. But it unfortunately happens that the troubled times which produce an appetite for new ideas are the least propitious for clear thinking.”
Directed by Alan Bridges, starring Alan Bates, Glenda Jackson, and Julie Christie
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West discovered that he had been unfaithful with other women
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And 1969, she undertook two long journeys to Mexico, becoming fascinated by the indigenous culture of the country and its mestizo population
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To report on apartheid in a series of articles for The Sunday Times, particularly regarding a prominent trial for a seditious uprising aiming to establish Communist rule
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Provided a critical review of Alistair Cooke's sympathetic portrait of Alger Hiss during his postwar trials from a classical liberalism point of view
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Was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
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On NBC University Theatre and featured a commentary on West's story and writing skills by Katherine Anne Porter
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And DBE in 1959; in each case, the citation reads: "writer and literary critic"
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When President Truman presented her with the Women's Press Club Award for Journalism, calling her "the world's best reporter
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And then expanded to the book in 1947), later The New Meaning of Treason (1964), a study of the trial of American-born fascist William Joyce and others; The Return of the Soldier (1918), a modernist World War I novel; an
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To start backing the Communist-led Partisans led by Tito in Yugoslavia, thus abandoning their support of Draža Mihailović's Chetniks, whom she considered the legitimate Yugoslav resistance
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1949 – The Meaning of Treason, edit new 1964 – The New Meaning of Treason
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“Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War”
“The Necessity and Grandeur of the International Ideal”
At the age of 37, she married a banker, Henry Maxwell Andrews, and they remained nominally together, despite one public affair just before his death in 1968
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Expressed the unorthodox belief that "Christianity must be regarded not as a final revelation but as a phase of revelation
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After seeing Bolshevik violence firsthand, West was exasperated that British intellectuals ignored Goldman's testimony and her warning against Bolshevik tyranny
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Even before the Bolsheviks took power in October 1917, West expressed her doubts that events in Russia could serve as a model for socialists in Britain or anywhere else.
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That "Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely
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– Indissoluble Matrimony, a controversial short story which was first published in Blast No
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Born 1892-12-21.
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In London, England, and grew up in a home full of intellectual stimulation, political debate, lively company, books and music
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There is one common condition for the lot of women in Western civilization and all other civilizations that we know about for certain, and that is, woman as a sex is disliked and persecuted, while as an individual she is liked, loved, and even, with reasonable luck, sometimes worshipped.
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